SIGNED TRAVELS OF PHYSICIAN NOBELIST. A Year in the Middle East: Expeditions in Iran and Afghanistan with Travels in Europe and North Africa, February 4, 1954 to December 22, 1954

Bethesda, Maryland: U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, 1991. Revised edition.

1954 JOURNAL OF NOBELIST GAJDUSEK'S YEAR IN MIDDLE EAST BEFORE HE DISCOVERED KURU--INSCRIBED TO HARVARD MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST JEFFREY WYMAN.

21x28 cm hardcover, green buckram binding, gilt title to cover and spine, inscribed front free endpaper, "To Jeff Wyman/ in our friendship by proxy through John Edsall/ & in lasting admiration/ D. Carleton Gajdusek/ March 1995." [2], map of Middle East, i-xiv, 141 full-page photographic plates (printed recto only), 483 pp text. Near fine--as new.

FROM NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE: "Gajdusek's multi-disciplinary interests make the collection extremely diverse and appealing to researchers in several disciplines including anthropology, biology, ethnology, geography, linguistics, medicine, primitive arts, and psychology."

DANIEL CARLETON GAJDUSEK (1923 –2008) was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'. He obtained an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In 1951, Gajdusek was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a research virologist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Service Graduate School. In 1954, after his military discharge, he traveled for a year in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. His journals, correspondence, and photographs were published in 1991 by the National Institutes of Health (offered here). Following this year of traveling, he went to work as a visiting investigator at the Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, where he began the work that culminated in the Nobel prize. From 1970 to 1996, Gajdusek was the chief of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at NINDS at the National Institutes of Health. Gajdusek's best-known work focused on kuru. This disease was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. Gajdusek connected the spread of the disease to the practice of funerary cannibalism by the South Fore. With elimination of cannibalism, kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder. He lived among the Fore, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims. Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. He then proved this hypothesis by successfully transmitting the disease to primates and demonstrating that it had an unusually long incubation period of several years.

JEFFRIES WYMAN (1901 –1995) was an American molecular biologist and biophysicist notable for his research of proteins, amino acids, and on the physical chemistry of hemoglobin, including the classic Monod-Wyman-Changeux model. Wyman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first scientific advisor to the US Embassy in Paris, director of a regional science office in the Middle East for UNESCO, a founder and past secretary general of the European Molecular Biology Organization, professor of biology at Harvard.

JOHN TILESTON EDSALL (1902 –2002) was a protein scientist, who contributed significantly to the understanding of the hydrophobic interaction. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Edsall worked with Edwin Cohn during World War II to apply protein methods to blood fractionation. Subsequently, in 1943, they published a book Proteins, Amino Acids and Peptides. This had a profound influence on the next generation of protein scientists.